Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

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kamiledi15
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Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Hello,
I'm new and have few questions. At first - I have many images, created in other program, which I want to use in animation. I found out that I can't just use copy and paste - I have to save every image as a file and then import it to Anime Studio. It's not very comfortable. Is there a way to use copy and paste instead?

Another question - the program is very simple in rotating or changing the scale of objects. But how can I put more frames into object? For example, I have a head and I have images of this head, when it blinks eyes, opens mouth etc. I can only put one image of every object - one image of head, one image of arm etc. But how to put more images of, for example, head? I hope that you understand, what I mean - sorry, I'm from Poland.

And last question - my animation will be underwater, so I need to create transparent water - how can I do this?

I tried to watch some tutorials, but it didn't answer my questions. Tutorials only show how to draw an object, how to rotate and how to change scale - all of these is very simple. I hope that it won't be a big problem to answer me, thanks.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

Which version do you have? What programs created these files?

Here's some general info:

For bitmap images, I recommend saving your images to PNG. Most 2D paint programs can do that. ASP/Moho can import layered Photoshop, which works well but if you intend to edit the original PSD after importing by adding, deleting, merging layers in the original, you'll probably run into problems. There are clear advantages to importing layerd PSD files but, IMO, it's better to output separate PNG images to avoid the potential problems entirely. But if you really want to import a single file for ASP/Moho, check if your 2D paint program can export layered PSD.

There is also a script that comes with ASP/Moho Called Export Layers To Anime Studio that will create a project for you with the layers in place. This works well enough but, again, could be problematic when you need to replace or add to the original images. Give it a try though.

What I like to do is use a Photoshop script to output all my visible layers to PNG. There is a native script for this but I prefer the free third-party script called Export Layers To Files (Fast). With either script, you can export the images with the original canvas size, cropped, with solid or transparent backgrounds. To import to ASP/Moho, you can select all the images at once. You'll probably need to sort the layers manually. (This is where the ASP/Moho script has an advantage as it will properly scale and position your artwork for you. Importing a layered PSD will do the same.)

BTW, one neat feature in Moho is that you can drag and drop an image, or copy and paste it. This creates a new file though. I find it most useful for pasting in screen caps or items grabbed off a web browser. Just something to be aware of if you upgrade to Moho.

That said, in general, copy and pasting from another art program isn't the best way to get art into Moho. You're creating a new file each time when you do this, so you may as well just save the original image file to specific folder before importing and just import all the images at once. It's faster and much more organized to work this way.

I highly recommend going through the basic tutorials so you get a handle on the general workflow.

For the second part of your post, I think you want to learn about Switch layers. This is a group that can hold many different drawings, like different hands or mouth poses, and allows you to keyframe which drawing is visible. Be sure to read the documentation on this since it's a significant feature in ASP/Moho.

By transparent water, I'm guessing you want a displacement effect. This is easier to do in a compositing program. I recommend Fusion or After Effects for that: just apply a fractal-based displacement effect and adjust/keyframe the effect to your taste. In Moho Pro, you can sort of do this by importing your rendered frames into Moho and using a custom mesh warp. That said, this is still much easier to do in a comp program, and it will look better too.

Hope this helps.
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Thanks, I have Anime Studio Pro 11. You say that it's possible to just copy and paste an image from another program, but it doesn't seem to work. I'm creating a game in another program - Multimedia Fusion 2 - and Anime Studio Pro will be used for cutscenes. I would like to just copy and paste images from Multimedia Fusion 2 to Anime Studio Pro, because body of my character contains 11 different images - head, arms etc. Every of these images contains own animations, so saving it into hundreds of image files and then importing it to Anime Studio will be hard. Ctrl+C - Ctrl+V doesn't work.
Yes, it's probably switches in layers - I can't find out how to use them, so I will probably have to read the whole manual.
About the water - so it's not possible to create transparent effect in Anime Studio Pro? I have to do this in external program, save it as a file and then import it? Well, that's not really comfortable, but it seems that I have no choice.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

Yes, you can but not in Anime Studio Pro 11, you can only do this in Moho Pro 12. That said, for character art painted in another program, it's better to save/render your art to a specific character directory and import all the files from there. This is a more organized way to work.

When you paste an image into Moho, it's going to ask you to save the image as a separate file anyway, so there is no advantage in doing that this way. There's nothing wrong with Copy and Paste (or drag and drop images,) because it's a quick and useful way to get images into Moho, but you can only do this one image at a time, and when you revise the image, you'll be saving the file to your drive to overwrite the previous version anyway. May as well do that from the start.

It sounds like you have a lot of pre-animated sprites from another program? I'm not completely sure how you would use that in a Moho rig. I would probably save each animation sequence to separate directories, and maybe use them as Image Sequences or Switch Layer elements?

Sorry, it's not very clear how you intend to use Moho to rig or animate these files. It's more common to import non-animated image files for Moho, and use Moho to rig and animate them for other programs (like a compositor or game engine.)
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

I just want to use animations, which I created - facial expressions, rotating from side to front view etc. And then create movie in Anime Studio Pro - when characters interact with each other. I thought that it will be easy, I just don't know how to add these switches and bones (I added bones, but I don't know how to connect it to objects), but it seems that I will have to read the whole manual (303 pages...).
You didn't answer me about water:
About the water - so it's not possible to create transparent effect in Anime Studio Pro? I have to do this in external program, save it as a file and then import it?
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Greenlaw
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by Greenlaw »

If you just want to make a layer transparent, you can adjust the opacity of each layer or group in the BG properties. You can even set different blending modes there like in Photoshop. Unfortunately, ASP or Moho do not display the effect of the blending mode until you render. Because of this, I suggest applying such effects in a compositing program.
kamiledi15 wrote:I...it seems that I will have to read the whole manual (303 pages...).
Yes, I highly recommend reading the manual. Depending on how your character is broken out, this could be an easy process or an advanced process, but either way, you need to be familiar with the basics to start.

The way I like to learn a new program is to run through the official tutorials and skim the user manual so I'm at least familiar with the available features and where to find the info when I have a question. Then, I'll create a personal project that uses as many of the features I'm interested in. That's what 'Scareplane' was for me. I think this is a good way to learn many software programs.

Online videos are a good source of info, but you should think of them as supplementary info. Many video makers assume you already know the basics when watching their videos.

This forum is a good resource for info too but most users here will also expect you to have at least done the official tutorials and learned the basics.

Regarding your artwork, it does sound like what you have can be used in Moho. A simple character setup would be to bind the main limb image layers to bones in a skeleton, and place the mouth, eyes, hands, art image in switch layers and bind the switch layers to the appropriate bones (i.e., Mouth switch to the head bone, Hand switch to the hand bone, etc.,).

Beyond that, rigging in Moho can start to get advanced. For example, to animate Switches you might want to use Smart Bone Actions to create dials so you can keyframe the different switch drawings, or use the Switch Selection Window, or Ctrl-Alt-Click over the artwork to call up a switch layer list, or Right-Click over the Switch Layer itself to call up the list, or use shortcut keys to cycle through the drawings. If you also want to do turnarounds for the character, there are dozens of ways to set this up. At this stage, we really are getting in 'advanced' territory, and asking in this forum can be incredibly helpful.

Just to be clear, asking 'beginner' questions is perfectly fine in this forum but be sure to make an effort to find the answers in the manual first.

Good luck! :)
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slowtiger
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by slowtiger »

It's possible, with a bit of organisation, but it will take a while when you have hundreds of them.

1. Check your animated body parts. Any animation which always runs the same way export as a video file. AS11 comfortably allows to set start and end image as still frames before and after the moving video.

2. If you need the separate images, like in hand gestures or mouth shapes, export as images. To import these, just grab a bunch of them on your desktop and drop them into the AS project window. Create a switch layer and put the imported images insde.
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kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Hi again,
thanks for your answers. I've read some of the manual and now I know a little more. I imported an image of my character and added bones to her. She looks like this:
Image
Now I want her to lower the head, so I'm selecting the bone in the head and move it down. But...
Image
Her nose disappears! What am I doing wrong?
And when I try to rotate her spine a little:
Image
Her whole body distorts. I just want to rotate her head, tail, spine etc, but without changing the shape of the rest of her body. Why when I rotate the spine, her face changes? I tried to change bone strength, but it doesn't help.

EDIT

Ok, it seems that the strengh of the bone was too low. I increased it and now the head looks good, but the rest of the body still distorts:
Image
I don't know how to set it up correctly. Maybe every part of the body should be a separate object?

EDIT

Ok, I solved it by myself - flexi Binding. It looks ok now.
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Ok, i think that I know everything I need - this is my first try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LImUwxR ... e=youtu.be
I know that the water moves too fast, but it's a good start. Thanks for your help :)
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

Ok, two last questions:
1. I created bones for my character and I can manipulate them freely. But I can't change the starting position. When I rotate bones at frame 0, they reset back to original pose. I want the character to have it's arm moved forward at the first frame of animation and I can't do this, I can only make an animation, when you can see how the character rotates its arm - I want it to be rotated from the beginning. How can I do this?
2. I created head with animation frames, when it opens mouth etc. I can create the animation in timeline, but to do this, I have to click on every frame of animation and set it to timeline. When I have many frames, it takes some time to do this. Is it possible to tell the program to show all frames one by one in single click?
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by mrc »

kamiledi15 wrote:When I rotate bones at frame 0, they reset back to original pose. I want the character to have it's arm moved forward at the first frame of animation...
In Moho, the first frame of animation is frame 1. Frame 0 is for setting things up, adding layers, drawing vectors etc. That's why it doesn't register your pose.
2. I created head with animation frames, when it opens mouth etc. I can create the animation in timeline, but to do this, I have to click on every frame of animation and set it to timeline. When I have many frames, it takes some time to do this. Is it possible to tell the program to show all frames one by one in single click?
I don't quite understand: Do you want to insert an already animated image sequence? You can do this by adding an "Image Sequence" layer.

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kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

I don't quite understand: Do you want to insert an already animated image sequence? You can do this by adding an "Image Sequence" layer.
I already have image sequence, but for example for winking I have 13 images. If I want to change animation to wink in frame 500, I set head animation to image Wink01 at frame 500. Then I have to move to frame 501 and change image to WInk02. Then frame 502 and image Wink03 etc. So I have to do this 13 times. And I wonder whether is it possible to do this in one click?
One more question - is it possible to change bitrate of exported animation? I would like to export the animation as mp4 file, but when I do it, the bitrate is something about 22000 kbps. For me enough would be 5000. Is it possible to set it somewhere?
Also, it would be nice if it would be possible to show every bone of my character on separate timeline, because when they are all on one timeline it's a little harder to control what is happening. But it's probably impossible if they are all on one layer?
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hayasidist
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by hayasidist »

kamiledi15 wrote:
I already have image sequence, but for example for winking I have 13 images. If I want to change animation to wink in frame 500, I set head animation to image Wink01 at frame 500. Then I have to move to frame 501 and change image to WInk02. Then frame 502 and image Wink03 etc. So I have to do this 13 times. And I wonder whether is it possible to do this in one click?
not quite one click but …

option 1: make an action (e.g. called "wink") for the switch sequence - frame 1 = make Wink01 active child … etc until frame 13 = Wink13; then in the main timeline at frame 500 insert the action (copy or reference)

option 2 if you've already got a keyed sequence you want - copy those keyframes and then paste them at frame 500.

hth
kamiledi15
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by kamiledi15 »

make an action (e.g. called "wink") for the switch sequence - frame 1 = make Wink01 active child … etc until frame 13 = Wink13
I don't quite undestand how to do it. In manual it only says how to use actions, which are already in tutorials, it doesn't say how to create your own. I created an empty action, I can see that it has its own timeline, but what's next? Do I have to do this as I wrote before, so click on every frame on timeline and every image of animation to put them all on timeline, and then I will be able to use the created action whenever I want? Do I understand it correctly?
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hayasidist
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Re: Anime Studio Pro - few questions for a start

Post by hayasidist »

kamiledi15 wrote:... so click on every frame on timeline and every image of animation to put them all on timeline, and then I will be able to use the created action whenever I want? Do I understand it correctly?
yes - that's it! -- in the action timeline frame 1 = make Wink01 active child … etc until frame 13 = Wink13 and then insert the action in the main timline

there is an option 3 - but that involves making a switch control file using a text editor and typing in (or copy-edit) the list of frame numbers and layer names: take a look at this thread viewtopic.php?f=13&t=32006&p=182533#p182533
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